How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
Olga, of whom we are about to speak, was born in the year 1900, in a wealthy, carefree family of nobles. (1)
From the very first line, Nabokov gives us the total set up. Olga is born into a noble family in tsarist Russia, which means that she's so rich that she has never had to worry about anything. Lucky her.
Quote #2
She spoke French fluently, pronouncing les gens (the servants) as if rhyming with agence and splitting août (August) in two syllables (a-ou). She naively translated the Russian grabezhi (robberies) as les grabuges (quarrels) and used some archaic French locutions that had somehow survived in old Russian families, but she rolled her r's most convincingly even though she had never been to France. (5)
It was the trend amongst the Russian nobility at the time to speak French. In some circles these nobles knew French better than they knew Russian. Olga clearly isn't one of these super fluent folks, but she's definitely on trend.
Quote #3
She wrote verse with that terrifying facility typical of young Russian girls of her generation: patriotic verse, humorous verse, any kind of verse at all. (5)
The narrator writes that Olga has a "terrifying facility" for writing poetry. What do you think is terrifying about it? Is this just a knock against teenage poetry?